The Department of Anatomy at the UIC College of Medicine was the recipient of a four-year research grant from the Buonacorsi Foundation. This grant supported research to develop new methods for teaching anatomy to medical students as well as students in the associated health professions.

The UIC project pioneered the integration of new web-based information technologies into the anatomy curriculum to provide its students with unparalleled access to a vast repository of richly-mapped and highly detailed multidimensional image data on human anatomy.

Beta tested at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) College of Medicine, AnatLab was developed with the help of many different groups. Professors, students and computer programmers used an annotator program, conceived and implemented specifically for AnatLab's development, to define the boundaries of each structure within each section of the Visible Human Male. Contributors include anatomy and neuroanatomy professors from the UIC College of Medicine. These educators have guided medical and biomedical visualization students in the completion of over 12,000 annotations. Their work has been paramount to the success of AnatLab and has resulted in the integration of the system into first-year human anatomy courses at the UIC College of Medicine.